December 17, 2015--Debate Postpartum

The first hour of Tuesday's GOP debate was largely devoted to candidates speaking from their talking points and thus it was predictable and, in political theater terms, boring.

But then in the second hour things heated up and it became more entertaining. It also revealed who might turn out to be the final three and the strategies those three will likely use to claw their way into that elite group.

To forestall any suspense you might be feeling, the final three will be TRUMP, Rubio, and Jeb Bush. Yes, Jeb!.

In regard to the ultimate nominee, after the Republican convention deadlocks, expect that to be Paul Ryan. He is hovering not too far in the background, trying to act like the SPEAKER and presidential. He's even taken to delivering ex cathedra speeches in flag-bedecked settings. The beard helps. Makes him look like a Founder.

But back to the final official-candidate three. Here's how things well play out. The other night we got a sneak preview of their plans.

Attack, attack, attack.

TRUMP will continue to do what he has been doing, while hoping for at least one or two more instances of domestic terrorism to lock in his over-fearful base while attracting enough quivering semi-independents who want a strong man to make America Great Again. He will be attacking individual rivals but ramp up his attacks on Obama, Hillary, and political elites, none of whom, in his view, know how to swagger on the world stage or have the experience or competence to get anything done.

Rubio, who won the debate the other night largely by glibly showing off that he knows "stuff" while displaying that he also has cojones by attacking Ted Cruz, will continue on the same tack. Expect more and more of his campaign fire directed toward his fellow Latino, Cruz, whose paper-thin voice went up an octave when under fire. Voters will not select for president someone who sounds as if he's inhaled helium.

And then there is the formerly hapless Jeb Bush who will continue to show he has moxie (plus gravitas) by relentlessly and effectively attacking TRUMP. It worked on Tuesday (look for this to show up in a post-debate bump in the polls) so expect more of the same. If he can, as he did, get under the skin of someone as formidable as TRUMP think what he'll do when it comes to confronting really bad guys like Putin and Assad.

Forget the rest of the candidates. Carson is now fully cooked, Christie was taken down by Paul Ryan of all people--he is less than half Christie's size--who revealed him to be the Third World warrior he pretends to be.

Shoot down Russian planes over Syria? As Paul said about Christie, "If you're looking for someone to start WW III, you have your candidate." And he couldn't resist piling on by making a nasty reference to Christie's alleged involvement in closing down the GW Bridge.

No one else is even breathing much less threatening to push their way into the inner-inner circle of final-finalists.

You heard it here.

October 30, 2015--Woman Enough

I managed to keep myself awake for the entire Republican debate. I even ignored the struggling New York Mets.

Though the CNBC moderators were as inept as has been widely reported (Carl Quintanilla, for example, mocked Carly Fiorina's three-page tax reform proposal, saying skeptically that it must be in "very small type"), they did a better job than in the first two debates of giving air time to the marginal likes of John Kasich and Rand Paul.

The reporters, though, missed opportunities to follow up forcefully. When super-slick Marco Rubio deflected Jeb Bush's well-rehearsed attack--"If you don't show up for your three-day French work week in the Senate, you should resign"--with an equally well-rehearsed response--"John McCain, Barack Obama, and John Kerry did the same thing"--an easy followup would have been to ask him if "three wrongs make a right."

Talk about situational ethics of the sort conservatives selectively hate; but in this perverse political climate, Rubio was enthusiastically applauded by the media-hating audience.

The morning after the debate I checked the cable talk shows to see what people were saying.

The consensus was pretty much that Rubio or Ted Cruz won (largely by attacking the "mainstream" press--Fox of course excluded), that Bush made things even worse for himself, and that languishing Chris Christie (who was the establishment's favorite and seemed invincible four years ago) helped himself. Maybe by next week at this time he'll be the first choice of  six or seven percent of GOP voters.

Fiorina and TRUMP appeared to at least hold their own, though The Donald didn't dominate or hold center stage as he did previously. But John Kasich was probably destroyed by TRUMP's put down--blaming him (falsely) for the downfall of Lehman Brothers, where he was employed, and the subsequent economic meltdown. Kasich could only mumble incoherently in response.

He will soon go away, joining Lindsay Graham and Bobby Jindal at the children's debate table in George Pataki Land. Yes, Jindal, in a manner of speaking, is still in the race.

Most interesting, perhaps, is the continuing popularity of Ben Carson, who, in effect, by saying very little and saying whatever he said so softly that he needed closed captioning, Carson managed to make it appear that he wasn't there or, minimally, was looming as the new frontrunner above the grungy fray.

This was strategically brilliant since he has very little of substance to say about policy issues. When challenged that his 10 percent flat tax proposal would blow the deficit even higher, he said, "OK then, let's make it 15 percent."

So his appeal is in not in the policy arena but rather in the affective or emotional realm.

On MSNBC, the reporter covering the Carson campaign interviewed a few of his supporters to discern why he appeals to them.

One said it's because he's "calm." Another that it's because he has been so "blessed by God," and the third that "America is sick and we need a doctor to heal us."

I was struck by how these views are so feminized. Calmness, godliness, comfort, and healing.

At a time when the two women running for the presidency--Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton--because they are striving to convince us that they are ballsy enough to be commander-in-chief and would not have a problem bombing the whatsis out of ISIS, Carson has chosen to put on display his softer, feminine side.

If Fiorina and Clinton  are "man enough," Carson is "woman enough."

It could work. At the moment it is.

September 21, 2015--Donald TRUMP's Prosperity Politics

You could have fooled me.

After last Wednesday's GOP debate I thought Donald TRUMP's numbers would either tank or at best stall out, and as a result I would be able to stop typing his name in capital letters.

But it appears that TRUMP continues to confound all conventional explanations. He can continue to talk about Carly Fiorina's face and imply that Barack Obama is a non-American Muslim and seemingly get away with it. Actually, thrive as he gets more and more outrageous.

Struggling to figure out what's going on, pundits keep getting it wrong.

The best explanation anyone seems able to come up with is that it's because he is the first candidate who comes more from the entertainment than from the government or business world and thus is better known and, in his own complicated way, better liked and more fun than all the other candidates combined.

Some claim it could also be that voters are so totally turned off by politics and politicians that even someone as gross as TRUMP is attractive as an alternative. In his case apparently grosser is better.

Perhaps, his supporters are saying, it's time to throw all the bums out and open a TRUMP casino in the White House.

To underline this latter point, the debate last week was called "Round 2" by CNN; and our niece, who is staying with us, not so under her breath suggested they should have hired ring-announcer Michael Buffer and had him intone, "Let's get ready to RUUUUMMMBLE!" as TRUMP led his smaller-than-life opponents onto the stage at the library of another showbiz politician, Ronald Reagan.

I myself like the TRUMP White House Hotel & Casino explanation because I am thinking that to his fervent followers he is more like a mega-church TV evangelist than just a big city deal maker.

That is he is a certain kind of preacher in the tradition of the Reverend Ike, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Joel Osteen.

Self-appointed ministers who preach the Prosperity Gospel.

Prosperity Theology is a religious doctrine that asserts financial well-being is the result of the will of God and that faith and donations to Christian ministries (especially those of the Bakkers and Osteens) will contribute to an increase in both parishioners' wealth and the likelihood that they will be Saved.

That these contributions also make preachers wealthy is just more evidence of God's will and how He will provide for those of faith. So, we see the Reverend Ike tooling around flauntingly in a fleet of Rolls Royces (see below) and Osteen and his wife Victoria going to the supermarket in Houston in twin sports cars.

TRUMP is a secular version of this.

Unlike Mitt Romney and other politicians who do not talk about much less flaunt their wealth, TRUMP, like the Osteens, lets it all hang out. As with them this is evidence that he has been chosen. As will be his followers. Thus, thrice-married TRUMP is in the lead in heavily-evangelical, socially-conservative Iowa.

TRUMP even aggrandizes his net worth. Forbes says he is worth perhaps $2.0 billion. He boasts it is closer to $10 billion. And like the prosperity gospel preachers, he explicitly promises that if voters follow him he will help them get rich.

"I will make America so rich we won't have to talk about the minimum wage."

Osteen fills 16,800-seat Lakewood Church every Sunday; TRUMP draws rockstar attention as he did in Iowa last weekend at a massive tailgate party before the Iowa-Iowa State football game even though, according to the New York Times, he spoke to the crowd for less than one minute.

There's a message in this as well--descend from the sky in your private jet, don't say too much (especially policy specifics), and leave them wanting more.

Which they will get by later today.

August 10, 2015--On the Rag

When I saw yesterday that Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times was about Donald TRUMP, half to myself, I moaned, "Here we go again. Yes, he deserves to be eviscerated yet more for his misogynist comments. Not for what he said at the debate about Megyn Kelly (in effect that she was unfair to him because she was--as he and I would say where we both grew up in Brooklyn--"on the rag") but for all the despicable things he has had to say about, as he would put it, "the women" throughout his life in public."

I promised myself I would get to it after reading through less-predictable stories.

When I did, as she less and less has done in recent years, Dowd this time surprised me with her fresh and tell-it-like-it-is insights about TRUMP, the media, and the state of our political culture.

Read it all if you haven't, but here's a flavor from the very end. About TRUMP talking about how he contributes money to politicians so he can have access to them and get them to do favors for him--

His policy ideas are ripped from the gut instead of the head. Still, he can be a catalyst, challenging his rivals where they need to be challenged and smoking them out, ripping off the facades they're constructed with their larcenous image makers. Trump can pierce the tromp l'oeil illusions, starting with Jeb's defense of his brother's smashing the family station wagon into the globe. 

Consider how Trump yanked back the curtain Thursday night explaining how financial quid pro quos warp the political system. 

"Well, I'll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding," he said. "You know why? She had no choice because I gave. I gave to a foundation that, frankly, that foundation is supposed to do good. I didn't know her money would be used on private jets going all over the world. 

Sometimes you need a showman in the show.

Go Maureen!

In the aftermath of the debate, the media was obsessed about one thing, the wrong thing--themselves.

Much of the commentary, on full display on Sunday's TV talk shows and on the Internet's political websites, was about TRUMP's on-going trashing of Fox News' Megyn Kelly. Did The Donald really say she was unfair to him with her tough questions because--did he imply--because she was menstruating?

With the exception of Maureen Dowd there was hardly a post-debate word about the most important issues. For example how the four governors among the GOP "Top-10" (is this about the presidency or American Idol?) exaggerated--OK, lied--about their records in Florida (Jeb Bush), Wisconsin (Scott Walker), Chis Christie (New Jersey), and John Kasich (Ohio). How they didn't tell the truth about jobs created during their terms in office, their states' budget deficits, and about how public education fared as a result of their leadership.

Here's a flavor--

Jeb Bush claimed that high school graduation rates increased dramatically during his eight years as Florida governor. They "improved by 50 percent," he boasted. In fact, most of the gains occurred after he left office. During his two terms graduation rates grew by 14 percent.

He also claimed that he cut taxes by $19 billion but failed to mention that most of those cuts were because of federally-mandated decreases in the estate tax.

John Kasich lied when he said that the state's Medicaid program "is growing at one of the lowest rates in the country." In fact, Ohio ranks 16th in enrollment growth among the 30 states that opted out of Obamacare.

Scott Walker claimed that because of his leadership, Wisconsin "more than made up" for the job losses that were the result of the recession. In truth Wisconsin gained 4,000 jobs since that time.

How did Maureen Dowd put it? This posturing and dissembling is the work of "larcenous image makers" and of course embraced by the candidates.

But enough about this. What did TRUMP really mean when he said Megyn Kelly was "bleeding from wherever"?

Megyn Kelly and her Fox News colleagues